The present application generally relates to discovering associations between business processes, users, network end-points, applications and network entities. More particularly, the present application relates to an automated discovery and mapping of IT (Information Technology) resources to business processes.
Traditional IT departments maintain information about IT resources of an organization, e.g., servers, networks, applications, etc. Through manual operations, the traditional IT departments were possible to collect mappings between the IT resources in each organization. Such mappings can then be used to perform a number of management and troubleshooting operations, including, but not limited to: inventory management, project planning, impact analysis, root cause analysis, configuration checking, virtualization management, IT resource allocation, etc.
Unfortunately, traditional network management and IT resource mappings do not capture an impact of IT resource performance on business processes. Traditional IT resource management cannot react in an effective, automated manner to important business-oriented issues, e.g., how a specific IT resource performance degradation affects which business processes, organizations, projects, etc. Therefore, traditionally, no automated assessment of a business impact has yet to be made that would allow a proper notification, prioritized remediation and overall business-oriented reaction to the degradation.
Traditional IT resource management departments often require time-consuming manual operations to interact with each IT resource administrator to obtain listings of users that are registered to use a particular application. Sometimes, administrators are reluctant or refuse to openly reveal identities of the registered end-users. A traditional manual discovery process of IT resources used in each organization also does not scale well under a current dynamic IT environment, e.g., when users are changing frequently (e.g., due to new project assignments, etc.), when applications are changing (e.g., due to a replacement of old applications with new ones, etc.), and when IT resources are changing (e.g., due to an installation of new server devices, a relocation of server devices with virtual machine migration, network reconfigurations, etc.). Thus, traditional IT resource management departments fail to recognize an impact of a dynamic status change of an IT resource on a business process, e.g., due to the time-consuming manual operations and/or the traditional manual discovery process of IT resources.